Stringer and the Oil Well Indians

by Lou Cameron

  She propped herself up on one elbow, resting a bare breast where her head had just been, to demand, “Just what do you mean by that, MacKail? I thought we just agreed to cover the story together, like we did that time in Tombstone.”

  He hauled her back down and said soothingly, “The shooting was over that time, by the time we wound up sharing notes and kisses. I don’t know what the story might be here in Tulsa, and the shooting may have just started. I’m not trying to get rid of you, Bubbles. I’m just out to keep you alive. The two of us can dig up more news, separate, without exposing you to the danger of my company in public, see?”

  She didn’t. She said, “Pooh, I still pack a ladylike little pistol in my purse and I’ll thank you to remember how happy you were about that when that rascal in Tombstone had the drop on you. The two of us make a dangerous team to tangle with and, in any case, a reporter is a reporter when someone has something to hide behind a hired gun.”

  He nodded but said, “I’m not sure Holt was sent to hide a thing here in Tulsa. I don’t know anyone here but the law, and while lawmen have been known to bend the rules, the breed of tough old birds policing this town don’t need to hire guns. On the other hand, I have made enemies all over in my travels. I was covering a water works scandal out on the coast just before Sam Barca sent me here. Crooked contractors might not know my boss just won’t run exposé on crooks who run full page ads in The Sun.”

  She thought before she decided, “Crooks here in Tulsa make more sense, dear. Frisco big shots could get you fired just as easy as they could have you killed. Those crooks in Tombstone never went after me or any other reporter but you, remember? It was you who exposed that salted silver mine, just as they’d feared you might. You have a rep for spotting crooked mining deals and, well, isn’t rock-oil a mineral?”

  He laughed incredulously and replied, “Not any kind of mineral I know beans about, Bubbles. I just had a look at an oil well and I still don’t savvy what I was looking at. I grew up in gold mining country and I was lucky enough to sniff salt when I was covering the Alaska Rush a few years ago. Once you know just a mite about hardrock mining your nose sort of twitches when things don’t smell right. I spotted those swindlers in Tombstone just because they seemed to be going about silver mining the wrong way. I don’t know the way you drill for rock-oil. Aside from that, I don’t think there’s any way to fake one. You just drill down until you strike oil or don’t. I’ve heard of crooks selling stock and not drilling at all. But…”

  “You see?” she cut in, “You’ve already thought of a way to crook people with fake oil stock, just like those crooks were doing with silver stock in Tombstone that time! I’ll bet that’s what some crooks here in Tulsa are worried about!”

  He started to tell her not to be silly. Then he said, more thoughtfully, “I don’t see how anyone could be worried about me spotting an oil derrick that ain’t here.

  Oil stocks are peddled back east, on Wall Street, as I understand the game. I don’t think my boss would spring for train fare to New York City and even if he did, I’d be lost as a babe in the woods amidst all that ticker tape. Even if I was able to make heads or tails of the stock market, why would a confidence man back east want to have me gunned out west? That water works scandal I was digging into works as well, or better.”

  She insisted, “Don’t be so modest. You said you just got here and barely knew anything about oil wells. There’s a forest of them growing, just outside, and if even only one of them is being run crooked, knowing you were poking about could make a crook nervous as anything. Don’t you remember that you didn’t know that silver mine in Tombstone was being operated by crooks until they shot at you to keep you from finding out, and made you find out?”

  He yawned and said, “Maybe. Right now we’re just talking in circles and, no offense, I don’t feel up to talking any more about oil wells, right now.”

  So she said, “Goody. Neither do I. Isn’t it my turn to get on top, this time?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Despite W.R.’s protestations and some most unladylike cussing, Stringer left the hotel a little before noon, walking sort of funny at first. The sky above was blue and clear where it wasn’t smudged with smoke from the gas flares all around. The skyline in every direction was dominated by oil derricks. They looked even bigger and uglier by daylight. But nobody seemed to mind them. Almost everyone who owned an acre of land seemed to have an oil derrick on their property and those who didn’t had oil lease offers posted out front. Everyone Stringer passed seemed to be in a good mood. They ranged in dress and complexion from grimy white derrick hands to cigar-store Indian, with most somewhere in between. For, just or unjust, the recent experiment of the Indian Nation had served to turn most of the population into plain old country folk of various shades. Stringer, of course, knew the Cherokee in particular had been as white as Indian at the time they’d been driven west at gunpoint. Their chief and spokesman, John Ross, had been seven-eighths white, mostly Scottish, and, like other prosperous Cherokee, he’d lost a fine plantation house along with his orchards and fields of cash crops when his white neighbors had decided he was a dangerous savage fixing to scalp them, dressed in his suit and tie.

  The same thinking had placed the Creek Nation out here with their traditional Cherokee enemies, with results anyone but a Washington political hack should have foreseen. The Creek and Cherokee had delighted in slaughtering one another long before the coming of the white man. The Cherokee had adapted first to living as white farmers and planters. So they’d included the practice of keeping slaves, buying them on the same market as their white business rivals. The Creeks, while just as willing to try civilization, once it had whipped them, had not only been willing to help escaping slaves, but had tended to intermarry with them. Just how much or how often was a matter of some dispute, with the Cherokee tending to dismiss their old enemies as more an African than American Indian nation, with the proud and mostly pure-blooded Osage joining the Cherokee on this point, leading to many an interesting Saturday night just a few years back. The one good thing Stringer could see about the oil boom was that all the local Indians might mellow some as they all got rich together.

  He was pondering what that lawyer had said about signing oil leases with Indians when he came to the Arkansas River, running muddy under swirling oil slicks, and had to stop. There seemed to be just as many oil derricks and oil-spattered houses on the far side. But there was no bridge at the end of this particular oily street, so he turned back from the dead end. Retracing his steps, he spied an older gent sunning himself on the edge of a roadside drilling platform and since the gent seemed calm and reasonable, asked directions to the local office of the Bureau Of Indian Affairs. The old timer gave him directions, explaining the BIA was around the corner from the Western Union office near the depot. Stringer thanked him and asked, “As long as you seem up to guiding greenhorns, could you tell me why you need such towers in the sky to sink wells the other way entire?”

  The old-timer spat and said, “It’s too hot and dry for long lecturings. So, suffice it to say that whether you drills with an up-and-down chisel-bit or one of them newfangled rotary bits, you still got a heap of iron to lift in and outten the bore. Both ways calls for even longer lengths of pipe to line the results. They come the length of railroad flat cars, and that’s a mighty tall pipe when you stands her on end. So all the lifting and dropping has to be done with block and tackle from on high until sooner or later you winds up with an oil well or a dry hole and gets to quit, see?”

  Stringer glanced up at the idle cables just dangling free at the moment and said, “I can see you finished doing one or the other here.” To which the old man replied with a nod, “Hit oil without as much gas as we might have liked. That’s how come I get to sit here, keeping an eye on the pump ’til she settles in.”

  Stringer nodded at the leather belting running from a nearby tin shed to the glorified water pump in the center of the messy platform as he said, “I see
what you’re up to, sort of. But how come you still need that big derrick, now that it’s done its job?” The old oil man looked sincerely puzzled as he replied, “Hell, we don’t need it for nothing. Why do you ask?”

  Stringer said, “I was just wondering. Wouldn’t it be neater to haul all that greasy timber out of the sky, once there’s no call for it being there?”

  The expert on the subject frowned and said, “It ain’t hurting nobody. It would cost as much or more to tear it down as it did to put it it up. So why bother?”

  “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to use the timbers from one derrick to build another?” Stringer asked.

  The old-timer shook his head and said, “I can see you ain’t an oil field man. It’s best to start each time with fresh timber and cut or bolt her as you build. It’s mostly cheap fir or pine. So we don’t build ’em to last and, like I said, nobody wants to work with the stuff once it’s been throwed together and gummed up with rock-oil.”

  Stringer cast a sober glance at the forest of similar derricks all around as he said, “In other words, half the derricks I see right now are just standing there, waiting to fall over sooner or later?”

  The older man shrugged and said, “To tell you the truth, I’ve never given that much thought. This field will likely be played out long before the wood rots off at the roots. So none of us will be here to worry about it, right?”

  Stringer knew better than to ask whether anyone cared about the local breeds and full bloods on the day of reckoning. He just thanked the old-timer again and went on his way, perhaps a mite wiser about the oil business, but still in the dark about that shoot-out at the depot with a man said to rent his gun by the hour. For it could hardly be a closely guarded secret that this boom was a gut-and-git operation, or that the big eastern oil trust was out to gobble up all the little boys. Teddy Roosevelt kept saying so, every other speech, and old John D. Rockefeller didn’t seem all that worried about it. It was no secret that old John D. was out to take over the new industry entire. He made speeches, too, and seemed to think he was doing the country a favor by standardizing the product and fixing a set price on the same to save folk the time and trouble of shopping about. But while old John D. was a hard-nosed, ruthless rascal, Stringer couldn’t see him stooping to the likes of the late Jack Holt. Standard Oil had been accused of a lot of mean things, but murdering a man before you tried to buy him out just wasn’t their style, even if he had something or knew something they were at all concerned about.

  The local wildcatters were, of course, less predictable. Most of them were tinhorn operators and none had the financial and political clout of the big boys back East. They figured to be out to buy up such oil leases as they could, prove a test well or more, and sell out to the eastern trust. That did allow some slack to their business ethics, and a tightly budgeted businessman might well find it cheaper to hire a gun than to pay off the Fourth Estate, assuming they were out to hide something big enough to be worth real money.

  But that was where Stringer got stuck. For as he’d told dear little Bubbles, he’d never heard of a way to salt an oil well, and nobody was going to talk old John D. into buying out a dry oil lease at any price. The stinkard who’d sent Jack Holt after him had to be afraid he’d expose something else.

  Stringer’s train of thought was derailed by a considerable noise coming his way down the narrow, rutted street. He glanced up to see four little Indians in a big white Stanley Steamer bearing down on him. The steam-driven horseless carriage made hardly any noise at all. The four kids were screaming their heads off, as the one at the wheel overcontrolled the speeding contraption from side to side, tearing pickets off fencing and almost running Stringer down as he, in turn, leaped from side to side while the big machine bore down on him, no matter which way he jumped. In the dust cloud behind the sidewinding Stanley, an adult male voice was calling it all sorts of names and adding, “Somebody stop that runaway, Goddamn it!”

  Stringer knew how to stop a runaway team. He’d never tried to stop a runaway horseless carriage before. But he knew that unless somebody stopped it, the steamer was going to deposit itself and all those kids in the river at the dead end to the south, so he whipped out his six-gun and shot it in the hood as it whipped by.

  That worked, after a fashion. The runaway Stanley kept going, wailing like a bansheee and spouting a sideways plume of steam that would have done Moby Dick proud. But when Stringer chased after it, enveloped in oil-scented hot mist, he saw it was starting to slow down as the pressure dropped. It still had enough mass to coast on down to the timber guard rail at the dead end of the street, but it wasn’t going fast enough to crash on through. So when Stringer caught up with them, the kids were picking themselves off the floor boards, somewhat subdued.

  The little Indian who’d been driving, or trying to, was a girl of about nine in a starched white pinafore that had likely been a lot cleaner when she’d put it on that morning. Two of the boys were dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and the third had a dirtier face and wore raggedy bib overalls with no shirt under it. Stringer asked them if they were all right. The only one who answered was the little gal. She said, “Now you’re gonna get it. Here comes Uncle Walter!”

  Stringer turned the way she was looking, as a tall hatchet-faced Indian dressed like Buffalo Bill in white Stetson and matching fringed deerskin shirt bore down on them, panting for breath between curses. The Indian was wearing a brace of silver-mounted Colts as well, so Stringer didn’t see any need to put his own drawn gun away until the other armed man smiled boyishly at him and said, “Wa! That was quick thinking. I never thought of shooting the son of a bitch when it lit out with my sister’s kids like that.”

  Then he noticed the one raggedy little kid and added, “All but this colored boy, I mean. Mary Jane, haven’t you been told not to play with colored children when I let you and your brothers drive into town with me?”

  The raggedy boy scowled from the back seat and protested, “I ain’t colored. I’m Creek, damn it, and it wasn’t me as opened the steam throttle just to see what might happen!”

  The big Indian turned back to Stringer as if for help as he explained, “Mary Jane has always been curious about mechanical contraptions. You should see what she done to her poor mother’s Singer machine, trying to sew sheet tin to leather. I answer to Walter Bluefeather and I brand my cows Rocking Tipi. What do I owe you for saving these kids a drowning, Pard?”

  Stringer put his gun away with a smile as he answered, “It was my pleasure, Walt, as long as you’re not sore at me for blowing holes through your hood and boiler. They call me Stringer MacKail and I fear I don’t know much about repairing a Stanley Steamer.”

  Bluefeather shrugged and said, “Hell, let her just rust in peace. I never should have let ’em sell me such a contrary hunk of junk in the first place. Takes a quarter hour to get up the steam to go anywheres aboard her and, as you just saw, once you get a Stanley going they’re sort of hard to stop. I left the kids in her with the burner going, just long enough to step into the tobacco shop for a chaw, and next thing I knew they’d took off on me like a shot.”

  One of the well dressed boys in the back said, “It was Mary Jane who fooled with the throttle, Uncle Walter.” To which the girl replied by sticking out her tongue at him. Stringer sort of expected Walter Bluefeather to at least fuss at her, but the overdressed Indian just said, “Let’s not cry over spilt milk, kids. What say we all go back over to main street and Uncle Walter will buy you all some ice cream?” He hesitated, then told the Creek kid, “You, too, nigger boy.”

  The young Creek swore in his own lingo and rolled out the far side to walk off, scuffing dust and holding his head high. The dapper Bluefeather called out, “Come back here, damn it! When I offers ice cream to a kid I expects him to damn well eat it!”

  But the boy he’d insulted just kept walking. Bluefeather shrugged and said, “To hell with him, then. You want some ice cream, don’t you, MacKail?”

  Stringer shook his
head and said, “Not just now, thanks all the same. What do you mean to do about this steamer, here?”

  Bluefeather said, “Nothing. I mean to buy me a better make in town afore we drive on home to my spread. I can afford all the autee-mobwheels I want, seeing I got a thousand head of longhorns and a dozen oil wells growing on my Rocking Tipi, now. I think I’d best spring for a Panard or a Buick, this time. I doubt Mary Jane, here, could crank a gas engine, willful as she may be.”

  As the five of them headed back to the center of town, Stringer allowed Mary Jane would likely bust a gut, or her arm, trying to start an internal combustion banger. But he couldn’t help observing, “Oil leases must pay well indeed if you can afford to be so casual about your property, Walt.”

  As the children skipped ahead, Bluefeather explained, “At a nickel a barrel, all day and all night, the money do roll in. To tell the truth, a nickel a barrel didn’t strike me as all that much, when they first offered it. But when you consider how fast and how steady them oil wells piss the stuff, them nickles add up faster than we can spend ’em.”

  The tall Indian spat and added, “It ain’t as if we haven’t been trying, you understand.”

  Stringer nodded and said, “I noticed you dressed both yourself and the kids sort of prosperous. But tell me something. What happens once the oil runs dry?”

  Bluefeather spat again and replied, “I’ll be in a fix the day my heart stops pumping, too. In the meanwhile, why worry about things that ain’t fixing to take place all that soon? They tell me this Tulsa field ought to last to the end of this century at the rate the country’s burning rock-oil. I’d sure like to be around that long. But, to tell the truth, I ain’t betting on it.”

  Stringer grimaced and said, “Well, it’s your oil and your future. You could even be right, if they keep making engines and oil furnaces at the current rate. No offense, Walt, but if I had an oil well I’d bank some of the money and be sort of careful about the way I spent the rest.”